Ukraine Crisis Limits Merkel’s Rapport With Putin

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Berlin in June 2012. Their countries have been trading partners, and rivals, for centuries.CreditCreditThomas Peter/Reuters

BERLIN — Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Protestant pastor’s daughter, grew up in East Germany under a system in which President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia served as a K.G.B. agent stationed in Dresden. Fluent in Russian, she literally speaks his language and, arguably, understands his view of the world better than any other European leader touched by the Ukrainian crisis.

With that shared background, not to speak of the extensive economic ties between the countries, Ms. Merkel has emerged as a pivotal leader in the crisis that erupted after Russian forces overran Crimea late last month, the only one whose advice Mr. Putin might heed. But for all the familiarity, and despite hundreds of hours spent together during their years as leaders of their respective countries, Ms. Merkel has so far been unable to bridge the gap with Mr. Putin, whose German is also good.

If anything, as the days dwindle before a Crimean referendum on secession, that gap is widening, and now Ms. Merkel is facing a perhaps historic decision on whether to take a harder line against Russia.

Since the first Russian forces infiltrated Crimea on Feb. 28, Ms. Merkel, 59, has spoken to Mr. Putin, 61, at least four times on the phone, her spokesman says. In the space of 10 days, she went from warning him to avoid “any step that could contribute to escalation” to bluntly telling him that Crimea’s plans for a referendum on joining Russia are “illegal.”

After one recent conversation with the Russian leader, she now-famously remarked to President Obama that Mr. Putin was in “another world.” She appears exasperated by his unwillingness to avoid further provocative steps, much less de-escalate the crisis, and her government is increasingly signaling a willingness to depart from its preferred approach of consensus building and lead Europe toward a harder line on sanctions and other steps to pressure and isolate Russia.

Germany and Russia have been trading and warring for centuries, of course, and it was a German-born princess who became czarina, Catherine the Great, who first conquered and absorbed Crimea into Russia in the 18th century. Germany was squarely on the fault line between East and West in the Cold War, and this direct knowledge of division sends a special shudder through Germany’s establishment today as the threat of a new European divide looms.

Germany is dependent on Russia for up to a one-third of its oil and gas and tens of billions of dollars in trade, while it is also a leading member of NATO, a pillar of Western policy and the biggest economy in the 28-nation European Union.

Since the 1970s, when Chancellor Willy Brandt embarked on Ostpolitik, or conciliation with the East, the German answer in reconciling those competing tugs has been to promote dialogue. But now, with an unwilling, even intransigent, Mr. Putin, that policy may be now exhausted.

“There is no compromise in sight,” said Alexander Rahr, a longtime Kremlin observer and the head of the German-Russian Forum, a nongovernmental group in Berlin. “Nobody really wants to move toward the other.”

Ms. Merkel’s pleas to refrain from the annexation of Crimea are now outdated, he suggested, given the apparent popularity of Mr. Putin’s move in Russia, which governed Crimea for two centuries before the Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine in 1954.

“He cannot turn back,” Mr. Rahr said of Mr. Putin and “she is not helping him out of the situation.”

In the absence of diplomatic progress, the European Union intends to move forward with tougher sanctions next Monday, and to sign, probably next Thursday, the political part of the Association Agreement with Ukraine that first sparked unrest in Kiev in November, Ms. Merkel and Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland announced on Wednesday.

Image

Germany is dependent on Russia for up to a one-third of its oil and gas and tens of billions of dollars in trade.CreditJohannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Speaking after talks in Warsaw, Ms. Merkel said she thought the West would need “a great deal of patience” before the Ukraine crisis is over. The ultimate way forward lies through diplomacy, she said, but noted that six days had elapsed since the European Union demanded a Contact Group bringing together Russia, Ukraine and other powers, making sanctions almost unavoidable.

“We are in the 21st century,” she told reporters, speaking of Europe. “We don’t solve conflicts militarily, we’ve said that. But we also don’t try to avoid conflicts.”

And the current crisis, she said, “is a very serious conflict in Europe.”

Before Ms. Merkel’s visit, Mr. Tusk took a highly unusual swipe at Germany and the chancellor as Poland proudly marked the 15th anniversary of its NATO membership.

“Germany’s reliance on Russian gas can effectively limit European sovereignty, I have no doubt,” he said, according to the news agency Reuters. “I’ll be speaking very openly with Merkel, making it clear that the existing climate and natural gas policies risk posing a threat to the security and sovereignty of Europe as a whole.”

Germany has pioneered alternative energy policies since Ms. Merkel mandated the gradual shutdown of nuclear power plants in the aftermath of the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan in 2011. Poland, which wants to reduce its dependence on Russian gas, hopes shale gas discoveries will gradually help, and in the meantime relies heavily on polluting brown coal to generate power.

In recent years, Mr. Tusk said, Germany “has been a strong example” of where dependency on Russian energy can lead.

Even so, faced with the unnerving possibility that dialogue will produce nothing in Ukraine, German leaders are sounding increasingly resigned to tighter European Union sanctions on Russia over Crimea, if only, perhaps, to draw Russia back to the bargaining table.

“Sanctions hurt both sides, that’s quite clear,” Germany’s defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, said Monday. “But if you look at the numbers, Russia has 15 percent of its G.D.P. depending on trade with Europe, Europe only 1 percent,” she added. “That means that the reliance on a functioning business relationship with Europe is much, much bigger in Russia.”

That is why sanctions should prod the oligarchs and Russian business, she contended, to lean on Mr. Putin “to bring him back on to the track of talks — he must open a dialogue.”

The Ukrainian crisis has increasingly brought a military response that unsettles Germans, who have largely renounced the militarism that brought World Wars I and II.

The German news media has given prominent play to reports that 12 extra F-16 fighter jets were sent to Poland, whose air force already has 48 such jets, after six F-15s were sent to the Baltic states last week and reconnaissance planes were deployed in Poland and Romania.

In a strong indication of how worried even conservatives are about losing good contact with Russia, former Chancellor Helmut Kohl on Wednesday gave a statement to Bild, the country’s biggest-circulation newspaper, saying that “great omissions” had been made in policy toward Ukraine. “The mood of revolt in Ukraine was not intelligently followed. Equally there was a lack of sensitivity in the dealings with our Russian neighbor, especially President Putin,” he said.

“We cannot forget: War is not policy,” he added.

Ms. Merkel’s governing partners, the Social Democrats, issued a similar warning. “Europe stands dangerously close to the brink of a military confrontation,” the party said this week in an unusually tense statement. “One hundred years after the start of World War I, military force should never again become the means of conducting politics.”

“Europe stands at a crossroads,” it added. “We must do everything in our power to prevent a new division of our continent and a regression into a pattern of confrontation long considered overcome.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Merkel Knows Where Putin Comes From, but Crisis Limits Rapport. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe